What's the Next Big Fix?

Captain's Blog Stardate 92652.86

I don't find any of the dev blogs from this week very interesting. Just to recap before continuing, we're getting a Command Specialization. Bridge Officers can be trained in any specialization. When you get a brand new ship and activate it, all your current ship's equipment will be moved over, and Science Vessels are getting Secondary Deflectors. Cool stuff, nothing too exciting. Let's move on.

There are a lot of bugs, features, and problems in Star Trek Online that players want taken care of. For the sake of argument (and because I want to add fuel to the fire lol) what do you think should be fixed, added, updated, etc. before anything else? You can only pick one thing.

Personally, I'm stuck between fixing and adding features to the Gateway, or updating the Foundry to be that amazing thing we see in Neverwinter. I'm just going to take the time to look at both of these and maybe by the end of this blog I'll make a decision.

The Gateway is a great tool because it's an extension of STO. The STO Academy fleet uses it for looking up member info, contributing or queuing projects, and more. If I had to guess, I'd say the average player has no use for it. Perhaps adding small things like Duty Officers and R&D (including equipment upgrade) would make the Gateway useful and amazing.

As for the Foundry, I have a lot of really cool ideas for stories. Frankly, I could do them with the state that the Foundry currently is in, but updates would make it so much easier. If we had the same Foundry that Neverwinter has, the story possibilities would be endless. Perhaps it would even make the game more fun to play. I know I enjoy both making and playing Foundry missions.

So I come down to Gateway vs Foundry. The Gateway would benefit more players but the Foundry brings enjoyment. As the owner of STO Academy my responsibility is to the players, so I should pick the Gateway, but I just can't help being selfish here and choosing the Foundry.

Don't forget, in the comments let me know what is the one thing that you want fixed, added, updated, etc. and why. Maybe you're like me and just can't decide between two or three things. Feel free to list them all, but just one :D

Written by Attilio on January 18, 2015 at 09:23 pm

Comments

TacPaddy(Member) said...January 19, 2015 at 03:25 am

Sorry, but I can't focus on just one thing. There are just too much annoying issues, that need to be fixed:
- Fix that damn annoying City Bug in the Defera Invasion Zone. It's been there for at least three years.
- Fix the Gateway to properly show Admirals / Fleet Admirals. Show faction-specific Career- & Rank-Icons. It's already in the damn code, you are just linking it to all the same icons. And when will the DOFF Assignment feature finally arrive?
- Update the Foundry to Neverwinter standards
- Alter the Loadouts to include Ground Equipment and Traits. Maybe then the ever present Loadout bug becomes history.
- It'S nice that you introduced two different Voyager interior, but WTH is the first Romulan Bridge Pack? And why is there no place for Romulans to show off their Trophies?
- All factions are at peace now. At least allow Level 50+ players of different factions to team up in Adventures Zones. They are supposed to cooperate, but you won't let them.

I agree when it comes to Delta Rising but what does that have to do with PvP? I, personally, cannot stand PvP. IMO it's just an outlet for the prideful and egotistical players out there. At least in my experience thats what it has been. Not to mention the vaping.

Loadouts - There is no way on earth that this was ever QA tested. A true QA system would have failed this before it was rolled out. And now they want to add more too it??? Talk about "building on quicksand" !

GFX errors - specifically Nvidia ones. Whatever they did with DR has significantly increased GFX crashes for me. Particularly during cut scenes. STO is the only game that causes these on my rig.

Actually now I see that in all writing I think I know which bug I'd, overall, like fixed.....the lack of a Quality Assurance department within Cryptic! :D

Anyone knows me knows that I'm not a complainer, but there are things about the game that bug me. As others have said before me, there are too many irritants to stick with just one.

1. Dilithium, dilithium, dilithium. Either reduce costs for everything or lift that utterly illogical 8k daily refining cap.
2. Loadouts. Expand the (ha!) functionality to include ground gear and traits.
3. T6 ships. KDF and Romulans got hosed on this one. SIX for Feds and only two each for the other factions? Patently unfair.
4. For crying out loud, fix the stupid City bug on Defera.
5. The lack of ship interiors for Romulan ships is simply criminal. A T'varo and D'deridex have the same tiny bridge? I don't think so.
6. Allow cross-faction teaming once characters have completed the "Surface Tension" mission. The segregation makes no sense.
7. PvE queues need to go back to normal and elite. Very few are being played now, with the exceptions of the Borg and Crystalline Catastrophe stf's. Seems Cryptic shot themselves in the foot with the n/a/e divisions.

1. Add a security officer on new Romulus. damn boring to have to go to faction to start some doff mission.
2. Fix City Bug in the Defera Invasion Zone.
3. Fix size bug for alien romulan.
4. Bind Marks to account instead of toon.
5. Give us the T6 fleet ships
6. shrink down the dilithium amount to do something.
7. shrink down the amount of marks to get reputation stuff.

first i want to say, that DR is getting better and better, of course health and shield ups for enemys is a bit...strange, but some new pves are nice (bug hunt, korfez(without benthan fail thingy)), and the DR Episode is cool, Good job.
My wish in future would be, more importance for fleets, like unique missions on the starbase to collect r&d stuff together as a fleet or such, or having a bonus in a stf for full fleet team...because the game is atm to much all about dps channels, thats boring

I agree with you about the PvE Queues. I used to play several of them, but lately I have trouble finding any that have full teams online. Most of them rave zero people playing them. When I do find a group to join, if I play on Advanced, I seem to be the only person who actually reads thescenario instructions. For example, I have played Azure Nebula Rescue six times lately. You have to rescue three ships in a minute and a half or you lose. in the first five games I played, NO ONE but me rescued any ships. The sixth time through, one other person rescued a ship, but I ran out of time before I could rescue a second one to satisfy the three ship requirement. As for the Elite missions, I gave up on them when I saw how hard people were working at what seem to be almost impossible tasks. Not only has the new system driven people out of PvE, but it has dried up the supply of high level crafting materials (which seem to be rewarded only in Advanced and Elite PvE missions.)
P.S. My favorite pet peeve is the never ending series of bugs in the Exchange (Most recently, its failure to show any items in an entire class, such as cannons or deflectors, until you back off to a command like "show all weapons."

The one thing I think should be fixed ASAP: UI is a fps eater. Really, I have a reasonable notebook, with a dedicated video card (GeForce 660M for the curious), a good amount of RAM and a reasonable processor. It is significantly better than the minimum recommended. I can play several game with everything almost maxed (Mass Effect Trilogy, Tomb Raider and others). In STO however, in any map, I hardly get more than ~20 fps with the UI enabled (and all graphics settings at minimum). However, the moment that I hide the UI, it jumps to ~55fps. It is possible to see that the game flows WAY better with UI hide without even looking at UI counter. It is not my machine. There is repoprts on the forums of players with different system configuration reporting the same problem. This is a known issue for players for ages. It is also known that it is a bug plaguing all the Cryptic games. However, I never saw a Dev acknowledging this or stating anything about it.

Personally id like Cryptic to give me a reason to log into the game for more then 1 hour at a time and hold my interest....Exploration might help that but not have good QA is hurting this game real bad.....Rush rush rush...got to give the feds all those toys that not everyone is going to want and buy.....Only reason that I never started playing my fav race Klingon is because they are lacking in so many ways.....Honestly I think Cryptic should change the name of the game to UFP and call it done.....NOT!